The present invention relates to a wheelchair for moving a patient, and, more particularly, to a wheelchair with a detachable walker so as to reduce the possibility of a patient falling and being injured.
Each year a typical nursing home reports 100 to 200 falls with approximately 35% of the falls resulting in injuries. It is also reported that over 80% of the falls occur among residents who cannot walk and, instead, use wheelchairs for their mobility and seating needs.
Falls among hospital inpatients are common as well. Approximately 30% of hospital falls result in injury. Patients who fall and sustain an injury are reported to have hospital charges over $4,200 higher than patients who do not fall. According to a 2009 report by the CDC, the total direct and indirect cost of all fall injuries for people 65 years and older exceeded $19 billion in 2000. By 2020, the annual direct and indirect cost of fall injuries is expected to reach $54.9 billion. The average cost of one fall for an older adult totaled $19,440 which included hospital, nursing home, emergency room, and home health care.
Furthermore, these costs do not include the long-term effects of falls such as dependence on others, lost time from activities, difficulty performing personal care and household duties, pain and suffering and reduced quality of life. Prevention of falls in both hospital settings and long term care settings is therefore an important patient safety and public health issue.
One of the areas where persons are likely susceptible to falls is in the transition of a patient from a wheelchair to a standing, ambulatory stance. The problem arises in that there are certain individuals who are strong enough to get up out of their wheelchair but do not have adequate balance to ambulate alone and are at a high risk for falling.
Such individuals often have cognitive impairment as well and have decreased safety awareness and the inability to acknowledge their functional limitations. This population may include, but is not limited to, residents living in dementia and Alzheimer's care facilities, other nursing home residents, hospitalized patents suffering from post op confusion or altered mental status, stroke victims and traumatic brain injury patients.
As such, the risk of a fall is great where such patients try to arise from a wheelchair to a standing position and/or try to transition from a wheelchair to a walker so as to ambulate on their own supported solely by the walker.
It would, therefore, be advantageous to have a wheelchair that can facilitate the transition of a patient from a sitting position on a wheelchair to a standing position to continue ambulation with a walker by providing a combination of a wheelchair and walker that can be attached to and detached from the wheelchair so that the wheelchair can act as a safety device in the event the patient loses his or her balance and falls backward.
It would also be advantageous to have a combination wheelchair and walker detachably attached together where there is a space intermediate the wheelchair and walker for the person to ambulate in a protective environment.
It would be further advantageous to have the walker readily detachable from the wheelchair so that the patient can continue ambulating solely with the support of the walker.